The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

124 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

of little use to Dostoevsky, except as a ‘Golden Age’ recalled in childhood or projected into a utopian dream. The first realm of Gogol’s that Dostoevsky will appropriate is the painful, embarrassed world of the ambitious poor clerk who insists that he cannot be the person he knows he really is – but unlike Gogol’s timid little men, these characters will find some other person, or some theory, to blame for it.

In fact, so brilliantly did Dostoevsky apply his new devices of psychological prose to Gogol’s flattened world that Gogol himself was somewhat eclipsed.28 In part this was due to Gogol’s confusing ideological profile: his final published book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends (1847) was a humorless and politically reactionary treatise, poorly received by the critics. In part the eclipse was due to tsarist copyright, which, after Gogol’s death in 1852, reverted for fifty years to his mother and four sisters. They were inexperienced in publishing and failed to promote or distribute new editions of his work. This matter was rectified only with the centennial of Gogol’s birth in 1909, and in the 1920–30s Gogol at last began to receive successors worthy of him.

Pushkin’s posthumous life is another story. Beginning in the mid-1850s, he became an idol and a myth. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy cultivated a special relationship with Russia’s premiere poet. In 1880, at the unveiling of a statue to the poet in Moscow, Dostoevsky delivered a speech declaring Pushkin a national prophet, the savior and beacon of his people, and his fictive heroes a force for moral good – in terms that would have stunned the poet, but that electrified the audience. Tolstoy, in every way Pushkin’s equal as an aristocrat, was not present at the ceremony (Turgenev had invited him to speak but Tolstoy politely declined; he disapproved of jubilees, for others and for himself). Tolstoy was the first major Russian writer not to pass through the Romantic school. “Read The Captain’s Daughter,” the 25-year-old Tolstoy jotted down in his diary on October 31, 1853. “Alas, I must admit that Pushkin’s prose is now old-fashioned – not in its language, but in its manner of exposition. Now, quite rightly, in the new school of literature, interest in the details of feeling is taking the place of interest in the events themselves. Pushkin’s stories are somehow bare.”29 As regards “details of feeling,” Tolstoy will indeed have no rival. But the “bareness” of Pushkin’s prose remained for him a constant inspiration. Twenty years later, Tolstoy would stumble across an abandoned prose fragment by Pushkin and credit it, together with the Belkin Tales, for providing him with the courage to begin Anna Karenina.